


Gigi Tweets Herself Back to the World

by kyrieanne



Category: Lizzie Bennet Diaries
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-16
Updated: 2013-01-16
Packaged: 2017-11-25 18:14:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/641633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrieanne/pseuds/kyrieanne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gigi Darcy and her twitter account. (Episode 1 - Episode 76)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gigi Tweets Herself Back to the World

**Author's Note:**

> I don’t know if anyone has ever written a story about a twitter account, but apparently I have something to say. This is my take on Gigi’s story which we probably won’t see a lot of in upcoming episodes. Also, I came up with my own version of what happened between Gigi and Wickham.

**GIGI TWEETS HERSELF BACK TO THE WORLD**

Gigi Darcy reads an article about how social media can help overcome shyness. 

 _The Internet lets you be you while also maintaining the quiet and privacy important to you_ , the article says.

She signs up for a Twitter account and asks Will what people do on Twitter, but he’s no help. He barely looks up from his spreadsheets and memos. She rolls his eyes. How someone can run an entertainment company and not get Twitter is beyond her.

She syncs her Twitter account with  _Get Glue_  and  _This is My Jam_  cause she likes music and movies. That’s ubiquitous enough to tweet about, right? Or do you twitter? Are they twitterings or tweets? She really isn’t sure about this whole thing, but see Gigi is curious.

She’s always been shy and ever since she quit swimming her world has gotten pitifully small. Sure, over the summer she switched schools and joined the tennis team, but those girls are hard to get to know. They’re so loud and bubbly and into being friends with each other.

And when she thinks about it Gigi realizes she used to be one of those girls – with her friends from swimming. She used to have besties _._ They grew up together at swim meets and made each other signs and friendship bracelets and cheered until their throats grew hoarse. When her parents died, besides Will, it was those girls who pulled her out of her grief. Even with her parents gone the world could be considered bright because she had them and they had a finish each other’s sentences kind of thing.

But then the mess with  _him_ happened and those girls tried to warn her, but she was so in love that she didn’t listen and best-friends-forever turned out to be incredibly fickle. Afterwards, after Will flew the Red Eye because the school called him when the tape was discovered, afterwards none of those girls wanted anything to do with her. It was like she was no one to them. They assumed she had known about it, participated willingly, and Will held her as she cried. Months later, she isn’t sure what stings more, the embarrassment of the tape or that the girls who so easily believed such ugly things about her.

By the end of July she’s nursed her wounds with Hugh Grant romantic comedies and Adele.  _Lots_ of Adele. Because Will is gone, she pumps  _Shake It Out_ by Florence and the Machine through every surround speaker in their penthouse apartment and dances across the wood floors in her socks. She goes shopping, rides the trollies because it is what she used to do with her mom, and realizes that there is an entire world out there who has no idea who George Wickham is or what she did and didn’t do with him.

She tweets (it is tweet, by the way) her brother who is visiting Bing and Caroline in Fresno. He doesn’t reply, but she is pretty sure that is because he doesn’t understand Twitter either.

 _Everything on the Internet must be understood through a filter. The distance between you and the world means there is always two sides to every story. Remember this when putting yourself out there,_ the article says.

At the end of July she gets an influx of new twitter followers and she isn’t sure why. Darcy too. She figures it is something that happens when you’re on Twitter long enough.

While she feels better, shaken out of her reverie a bit, that doesn’t change the fact that she is lonely. She was supposed to spend August on the New England beach with her swim team friends. Will offered to take her on a vacation, but she says no. He seems oddly relaxed staying with Bing. He talks a lot about wine tastings and asks her about Top 40 radio, which is adorable. She thinks there might be a girl or at least a new group of friends because there seem to be a lot of outings. Her brother doesn’t do outings. He does work. And there is buoyancy when he calls her. He is happy and that causes her to smile into the phone. It makes her happy. Too happy to drag him away from it just because she is a little sad.

Instead, she throws herself into reading for her lit class in the fall. She gives up on Middlemarch after 350 pages and just watches the movie. She hides inside the stories, pulls every epic romance she can find from the library, and leaves the books scattered around the apartment. She picks them up on a whim, between meals and tennis practice, and every time she finishes a new one she stacks them by her bedside. They are a reminder that love isn’t always sad.

At the end of August, Fitz takes her out to dinner and gives her a tutorial on Twitter. She realizes she’s been using the @ reply wrong the entire time. Caroline calls her, which is odd because they don’t really talk, and tells her about the houseguests they’ve had for weeks now and suddenly her brother’s mood makes sense. She teases him about his rapidly improving entertainment skills, but he won’t tell her the full story. And Gigi learned years ago to take Caroline’s version of a story with a grain of salt.

In the fall, she heads to school and the only thing she likes about it is that it is on the West Coast. Her roommate, Lauren, gets her into Ed Sheeran, but otherwise she doesn’t really connect with anyone. Will comes home abruptly at the end of September. He won’t explain why except to say Pemberley Digital needed him in the office. She doesn’t believe him because that lilt in his voice, the hopeful one, isn’t there anymore. She drives home on the weekends and Will doesn’t ask questions just like she doesn’t notice the change in him. They eat together at the island in the kitchen; recall how their father used to insist on formal meals every night, and nudge their Styrofoam takes out containers. It might be from a 5-star French restaurant, but there is no denying it. Things have changed since their parents died. They have changed. It is just Will and Gigi now. The Darcy’s are two lonely kids who had to grow up too fast.

She digs into the Internet, begins to interact with the people who follow her twitter. It breathes some life into her small world. It proves to her that there are people out there in the world, strangers who share her interests, and someday she might fall in with people who won’t use her and hurt her.

And then as quickly as he was back in San Francisco Will is gone again. This time he takes Fitz with him and Gigi is left with no particular reason to come home on the weekends. So she stays in her dorm room alone and tries not to think about how busy and full her life used to be.

Lauren invites her to go out with her friends. Her boyfriend knows the bouncer at this great bar. He can get her in since Gigi doesn’t have a fake ID anymore. She cut it up after  _him_ ; he was the one who got it for her and put  _Gigi Wickham_ on it as a joke. She turns Lauren down. The first time  _he_ kissed her was in a bar, in the corner, as dance music pulsed in her ears. She thought it was her heart beating at the time.

But, like the article says, there is a filter between the real story and the Internet sees. On the Internet she is happy, go lucky, because deep down she used to be that girl. She wants to get back to that girl. The truth is she doesn’t know if it is possible to be that girl again. That girl was saccharine when in reality the world has a lot more bite to it.

“What do you think Dad would have done?” Gigi asks her brother one night over the phone. She can hear the click of his keyboard keys across the line.

“Done about what?”

“You know…me.”

“What is there to be done about you?” She can hear Will stop working and shift.

“Oh, you know our family and their expectations.”

“Gigi, I do not know what you’re talking about.”

Gigi bites her lip, “I feel like a disappointment.”

There is a pause and she can see it:  Will’s hand flexing against his leg and his jaw tightening. She thinks he is angrier about the whole thing than she is. He always listens if she wants to talk, but Will doesn’t talk about how he feels. Their father hadn’t been big on expression and after their death Will seemed to shoulder his persona like a mantle.

“You will never be a disappointment to me,” he says, “You will never be anything other than my sister.”

It is said with resolution, conviction. She loves those clipped words, the seriousness of them, because even if she teases him for being robotic she appreciates his gravitas. She appreciates his absolute consistency in her life. She wishes he had someone as resolute to stand there next to him. Someone who made him feel safe the way he did her.

“Thanks, Will,” she smiles, “now go finish your report for Aunt Catherine so you and Fitz can come home.”

“I’ve got one other thing to see to before I go. It might take a few extra days,” he says and Gigi can’t help but notice that that lilt in his voice again. It is the one from the summer when she thought he might be happy or at least hopeful.

But then she gets a cryptic text from Fitz…

_Call your brother. He’s had a baaaaaaaaaaad day._

And she tries. Again and again and again, but she can’t get a hold of him. She tweets him thinking maybe that’ll get his attention, but it doesn’t. She wrings her hands and paces her dorm room. Lauren remarks she’s pretty stressed out over her brother’s bad day, but Lauren doesn’t get it. Will is her family.  _Her entire family_. He has done everything for her – rescued her and raised her and reminded her to smile - and there is nothing she wants more than to return even a little bit of that favor.

When he calls two days later she is ready to give him a piece of her mind for not returning her calls, but he sounds so flat, so resigned, that she can’t bring herself to do it. Instead, she extracts a promise for him to explain when he is ready. And Will knows she never forgets a promise.

She takes a break from Twitter after that. Whatever hurt him dredges up memories of the danger of too much exposure.

They spend Thanksgiving with the Lee’s and it is about as good as she could expect. Caroline is fairly fake, but Bing is happy go-lucky. They try to get Will into karaoke, but he won’t budge. The best part of the night is that Caroline teases him about singing something from  _Newsies_  and he shuts her down so quick it isn’t funny. It makes Gigi smile.

She makes it through finals and pulls out straight A’s, which is good because last spring her grades were horrible. Afterward, when she pulls into their building’s garage, Will already has the car packed up for their ski trip. He hasn’t even bothered to change from the office. He holds her so tight she can feel it in her ribs.

“What’s gotten to you?” She says as they climb into his terrible practical sedan.

“I’ve been meditating lately about the importance of family,” he says.

Gigi frowns out the window. She is with him all the way, but here is the thing about their family…it is just them. Someday they were going to need to open up. It can’t be just them forever. She doesn’t think she can do this weird half-life they're both leading forever. And for the first time since  _him_ , Gigi stops thinking about what happened and looking forward to what might happen.

For Christmas, Will spoils her. He always does. He doesn’t say it, but she can always tell which gifts he bought for her with one of their parents in mind. The necklace from Tiffany’s is really from their mother because she always bought Gigi something from Tiffany’s. Their mother had been beautiful and loved beautiful things. The new mini ipad is from their father because he always had a weakness for tech toys. And the beautiful leather bound set of classic English novels is from him. He is opposite from their father in that way. He prefers older things, things of substance and history, to the new and shiny.

But the best gift is an explanation. Over dinner on Christmas Eve Will tells her about Lizzie Bennet.

He warns her – part way though – about George Wickham and that almost ruins everything, but it doesn’t because Gigi is beginning, just starting, to move beyond all of that. And the way Will talks about this girl is worth even hearing Wickham’s name. That lilt in his voice returns. His tone is soft – a little bewildered – and the specifics he mentions tells her this is a girl who has captured his attention. The story keeps them up half the night and when he finally stands to go to bed, she can’t help but ask, “What now?”

He looks over his shoulder, “I don’t know if there is a now. I tried.”

 _Try again,_ she wants to scream but part of her hates this Lizzie Bennet for not seeing what is so obvious to Gigi. She wants to shake this woman until she gets how good her brother is. How much he wanted love just like the rest of them.

She watches the first video and decides Lizzie is pretty and smart and different than any girl Will has ever shown interest in. She’s not like their mother or Gigi herself. She is open and exuberant and surprisingly sincere even through the distance of the Internet.

She keeps going and by the Vidcon video makes another decision: Lizzie Bennet is funny. And the world around her is funny. Her banter with her sisters and even the weirdness of her family makes Gigi laugh even though they are strangers. Gigi steeps in it, bites her lip to keep from smiling, and makes excuses to Will when he knocks on her door. She tells him she’s a little hung over from the Christmas Eve champagne they split and he lectures her for two minutes about sobriety before she reminds him he was the one who gave it to her.

It is all there: his terrible attempt to get Lizzie to dance and every move he made over months that just went awry. Gigi has never seen two people totally miss one another so thoroughly.

But along the way Gigi falls in love with Lizzie Bennet. Her heart aches when Charlotte and Lizzie fight. Will hadn’t told her about that and despite the fact that Gigi knows how this ends – Lizzie spurns her brother – she can’t help but become wrapped up all of it, not just the parts that have to do with Will.

Then there are the bits with Wickham and she skips over those. No need to go there.

And when Charlotte and Lizzie makeup it strikes Gigi what it is about these videos. It isn’t that she is getting some weird meta look into the girl who her brother (still) loves, but also…she wants to be Lizzie’s friend. Or at least she wants a friend like Lizzie and Charlotte and Jane and Lydia, who Gigi thinks is brave. Braver than she is. Lydia is so out there, so impassioned and unencumbered by what other people think. Gigi wishes she knew them. It makes her think of her former swimming friends and she cries a little. Not because the videos make her sad. They show her a world with sisters and friendship and she misses that world.

She watches the videos till her eyes droop. When she gets to the part where her brother shows up her heart is hammering in her chest. The whole thing is…illuminating. She can see both sides of it – how Lizzie could think him a stuck-up robot and how he could say that stupid thing about family expectations – but what she can see more than anything is that this girl could be it. This girl could be that person to stand next to Will, to challenge him and be a real partner.

And then she watches the last one and she gasps when Lizzie says she is going to shadow Pemberley Digital.

She tweets Fitz, confirms he had something to do with this, and grins. She closes her laptop and realizes that the filter of the Internet was going to have to come off if the whole story was going to be revealed. And not just for her brother and Lizzie Bennet. She didn’t get on Twitter to overcome shyness. She wanted a filter between her and world, a world that shinned too brightly at times. But maybe it was time to join the world again.

 _The Internet is both safe and unsafe. You can be yourself, but the internet does not replace real life,_ the article says,  _you cannot hide online forever for your story deserves to be told in real time._


End file.
